Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 21:22 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> On 2011-06 -16, at 16:41, Ian Davis wrote:

> > The problem here is that there are so few things that people want to
> > say about web pages compared with the multitude of things they want to
> > say about every other type of thing in existence.
> 
> Well, that is a wonderful new thing.  For a long while it was difficult to
> put data on the web, while there is quite a lot of metadata.
> Wonderful idea that the semantic web may be beating the document
> web hands down but that's not totally clear that we should trash the
> use of URIs for use to refer to documents as do in the document web.

I'm sure Ian wasn't claiming the data web is "beating" the document web
and equally sure that you don't really think he was :)

FWIW my experience is also that most of the data that people want to
publish *in RDF* is about things rather than web pages. Clearly there
*are* good use cases for capturing web page metadata in RDF but I've not
seen that many in-the-wild cases where people wanted to publish data
about *both* the web page and the thing.

That's why Ian's "Back to Basics" suggestion works for me [as a fall
back from "just use #"]. My interpretation is that, unlike most of this
thread, it wasn't saying "use URIs ambiguously" but saying "the
interpretation of the URI is up to the publisher and is discovered from
the data not from the protocol response, it is legitimate to use a
http-no-# URI to denote a thing if that is what you really want to do".

Thus if I want to publish a table of e.g. population statistics at
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population then I can do so and use that
URI within the RDF data as denoting the data set. As publisher I'm
saying "this is a qb:DataSet not a web page, anything that looks like a
web page when you point a browser at it is just a rendering related to
that data and that rendering isn't being given a separate URI so you can
talk about it, sorry about that".

> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then 
> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
> express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.

Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.

[As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]

Dave

Received on Friday, 17 June 2011 11:36:20 UTC